Posted tagged ‘cloverdale’

I can’t believe it, but I am going to link to Gregg Easterbrook twice in one day without (too much) snark.

So, while his TMQ column for Monday (sic) did contain an elementary error (the planets move against a background of the “fixed” stars, not the other way round — which Easterbrook honorably corrected at the top of his next column) he gets something else quite right.

TMQ’s estimate of 100,000 tons for the Cloverfield monster was based on the Empire State Building weighing 340,000 tons; TMQ assumed a biological object the size of that building might weigh less, containing no steel. Kendal Stitzel of Fort Collins, Colo.,, countered, “Therein lies the rub, for there is no known bony material that could support the weight of something that large without collapsing under the creature’s own mass. This is the famous square-cube problem: when a creature gets larger, its weight (which increases in proportion to volume) increases as the cube of the increased dimensions. The animal’s strength, however, can only increase in proportion to the square of the increase in dimension. Just as the Empire State is not supported by its masonry but by the steel and concrete structures inside, you would need some kind of similarly strong biological material to support any giant monster, be [it] Godzilla, Mothra or Cloverfield. There have been giant critters in the past, but no land mammal larger than the woolly mammoth. Whales are big, but their bodies are supported by water. Dinosaurs grew to be perfectly enormous; some were an order of magnitude larger than any other land creature since. Skeletal adaptations let them do this — but they were near the limit of what is possible for critters on our planet, and the largest dinosaurs reached only a fraction of the size of many movie monsters.”

Readers with a taste for both great science writing and the history of modern biology probably know the ur-form of this idea as expressed by the great British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, in his classic essay, “On Being the Right Size.”

Read the whole thing. It’s smart, witty, elegantly written, and it contains one of the earliest popular accounts of perhaps the most important single change in the practice of biology in the last century. Haldane himself was one of the pioneers in the mathematical treatment of natural selection and evolutionary theory, and he introduced the general public to the virtues of applying even the simplest quantitative ideas in “On Being the Right Size,” a simple, virtuouso tour through the implications of scale for everything an organism might want to do.

And in making the point that Easterbrook’s correspondent, Kendal Stitzel picks up, Haldane produced one of the truly great passages in all of science writing — the quotation of which is the reason for this entire post:

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

Splashes!

That’s real writing. Once read, it is impossible to forget the idea within the image.

Image: The Darley Arabian (one of the three founding horses of English thoroughbred brood stock. After 1704. Source: Wikipedia Commons.